In many European countries, wages are determined by collective bargaining agreements intended to improve wages and reduce inequality. This column compares the impact of different wage bargaining models in Italy, which has limited geographical wage differences in nominal terms and almost no relationship between local productivity and local nominal wages, and Germany, which has a tighter link between local wages and local productivity. The Italian system is successful at reducing nominal wage inequality, but creates costly geographic imbalances. If Italy were to adopt the German system, aggregate employment and earnings would increase by 11.04% and 7.45%, respectively.

Concentrated labour markets, in which workers have few choices of potential employers, reduce the wages of workers when they are not covered by collective wage bargaining agreements. But these types of agreements have become much less common in the past 20 years. This column uses employee-level data to show that even though UK labour markets have not on average become much more concentrated, concentration – which varies a great deal across regions and industries – is having a bigger impact on wages than before.

Trade union membership has been declining since the 1980s. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the potential of collective bargaining to address rising wealth inequality and poor wage growth. This column presents an OECD report on collective bargaining institutions and practices across member countries and selected emerging economies. Despite substantial variation across member countries, the overall pattern is one of a broad decline in the use of collective bargaining to set the terms of employment.

International trade has significant effects on domestic labour demand. It opens up new markets for export, but also creates opportunities for off-shoring. This column presents the results of a study on trade, wages and collective bargaining using data on French manufacturing firms. Both exporting and offshoring are found to have positive effects on wages, with collective bargaining agreements, particularly those at the firm-level, seeing greater wage gains for all types of worker.

The link between public- and private-sector compensation has important implications for the labour market and price competitiveness. This column reports that manufacturing and government wages co-move both in the long and short run, but that the long-run co-movement is much stronger where the government is an important employer. This co-movement tends to break down during fiscal consolidation periods, except in large-government countries. Moreover, manufacturing wages exhibit a stronger co-movement with productivity in countries where government wages are set via collective bargaining.

The state of labour markets in advanced economies remains dismal despite recent signs of growth. This column explains the IMF’s logic behind the advice it provided on labour markets during the Great Recession. It argues that flexibility is crucial both at the micro level, i.e. on worker reallocation, and at the macro level, e.g. on collective agreements. It suggests that the IMF approach is close to the consensus among labour-market researchers.